We didn’t wind up playing D&D.  The guy who was GMing our D&D game is out of town this weekend, so we got a backup game going – Shadowrun.

I played this game once at a convention a couple decades ago…  So I’m really not terribly familiar with it.  And, aside from the new/backup GM, neither is anyone else.  Most of the game was spent simply finding out what characters were capable of, what was “normal” in the Shadowrun world, what various skills did…  Things like that.

For the most part, since none of us had a clue what we were doing, we just grabbed sample characters.

We had a street samurai, an enforcer, a technomancer, a gunslinger adept, and I was playing a drone rigger.

It was very interesting to play in a completely different setting.  I mean…  The game mechanics were different, but that’s almost irrelevant.  You get different game mechanics going from one edition of D&D to another, or one GM to another.  But it’s still D&D…  It’s still that high-fantasy setting with fighters and mages and rogues and elves and half-orcs and gnomes…

It’s still fairly predictable.

Folks know what to expect when you toss off a fireball.  Everyone knows that an elf makes a better rogue than, say, a half-orc.  People are familiar with the critters inhabiting the world, and roughly how much of a challenge they are at various stages of the game.  Walk in on a few umber hulks and you know you’re in for a good fight.

In Shadowrun, however, we’re all noobs.

None of us knew what our characters were capable of.  None of us knew what various pieces of gear did.  None of us knew what the geography or politcs of the world looked like.

One of our first tasks was to get from Manhattan to Seattle…

Now, in a D&D-type setting, this would be a fairly arduous trek.  It would take months of travel to get from one side of the continent to the other.  And we immediately started musing on what kind of supplies to pack and how far we could travel in a single day and things like that.  Then we noticed we’d be going through several different countries, and started worrying about security clearance and passports and whatnot.

Then our GM helpfully stepped in and informed us that we could just take a plane from Manhattan to Seattle with very little trouble.  Which actually makes perfect sense.  But when you’re used to riding around on horses, it certainly isn’t the first thought that pops into your head.

So, we were asked to go to Seattle and sneak some innocuous looking canisters into some building.  I’m sure they’ll cause something bad to happen eventually…  But we were simply told to get them into the building, and we didn’t ask a whole lot of questions.

We flew out to Seattle, and scouted around the place a bit.  Our technomancer hacked into some government mainframe and pulled up some building schematics…  We figured the safest way into the building would be from the roof.  We programmed up some fake security cards, and then I dropped everyone onto the roof with some paraglider drones.  Then I followed them in with some kind of combat drone.

Our technomancer was running overwatch from a park bench somewhere, while I stayed behind back at the airport.  We made it into the building OK, and then into the labs, and then we got the canisters placed…  But that’s about the time our luck ran out.  Some security guards were just a floor or two away from us, and there wasn’t really time to get out before getting caught.

Our technomancer tried to disable the elevators and set off a fire alarm on a lower floor, but he screwed up, and triggered some alarms he didn’t intend to.  A counter-hacker showed up in the system and ran him off of the security network, so we were on our own.

I distracted the guards momentarily with my drone, and then self-destructed it.  They all ran for the roof.  Had a brief firefight while strapping in to the paragliders.  I got them off the roof, and then ditched them in an alley a few blocks away – I didn’t want to lead folks right back to our rendezvous point.

In the mean time, our technomancer was grabbing high-security files left and right – making copies of anything that looked even vaguely important.  Once everyone was clear, he disconnected, and headed for the rendezvous point.